Families cope with tainted drinking water

Scott Streater@PensacolaNewsJournal.com

Fifteen years ago, Dwayne McCants suspected something was wrong the minute he turned on the kitchen faucet in his grandparents` home just north of Pensacola.

The water from the backyard well was light brown and smelled like gasoline. But his grandparents didn`t seem to notice. Neither did his wife, Natile, who was living at the house with their two children while McCants was stationed at an Army base in Strasburg, Germany.

I thought, `Maybe it`s just me,` said Dwayne McCants, 42. But you know how you get an uneasy feeling about something? It was just apparent to me. This water doesn`t smell or taste or look right.

His concern turned to alarm when his son and daughter, who were 7 and 3 at the time, started breaking out in a rash.

McCants was right to be suspicious. Unknown to him, underground fuel tanks at a Texaco service station next door had been leaking for months, releasing an estimated 25,000 gallons of gasoline into the groundwater.

The leak wasn`t discovered until Tex Oil Inc. officials noticed a huge discrepancy between the amount of gasoline that was supposed to be in the tank and the amount that was sold.

By then the gasoline had already contaminated the backyard wells used by the McCants family and four other homes.

When health experts and environmental regulators tested the wells, they found levels of benzene thousands of times higher than federal standards for safe drinking water.

In addition, they ordered an explosives test in one home because the fumes in there were so heavy that we needed to make sure there wasn`t going to be a potential explosion, said Robert Merritt, an Escambia County Health Department environmental supervisor who investigated the site.

Recalls McCants: They asked us if we had been drinking the water and we said yes. They said, `No way, you couldn`t be.`

One of the polluted wells belonged to Jimmie and Mary Lee Perkins, who lived next door to the McCants.

I became aware of it one night when I got water from the faucet. There was a film on top and it smelled like gasoline, said their daughter, Regenia Nettles.

I didn`t drink it, she said. We bought bottled water. We did that for a long time.

But neighborhood residents couldn`t avoid the polluted water entirely.

We had to bathe in it, said Johnnie Mims, 52, who lived across the street from the McCants. We worried about it, but we just prayed.

The Health Department supplied bottled water to the families for weeks. And it paid $8,462 to hook up five homes in March 1988 to the Escambia County Utilities Authority water system.

After years of work, the Health Department expects to complete the cleanup at the now-abandoned gas station this fall, said Buck Paulchek, a Health Department engineer overseeing the effort.

Total cost: $1.2 million.

Today, family members are left to wonder if the levels of pollutants they were exposed to have caused them any long-term health problems.

The concentrations of pollution in the water were high enough to pose a risk of leukemia and cancer for the adults and children who were exposed, said Dr. John Lanza, Escambia County Health Department director.

Exposure to benzene, he said, can lead to leukemia because it causes genetic damage, especially at the doses these people were found to be exposed.

Lanza said Health Department staffers took blood samples of at least two of the children, but nothing jumped out at us.

Jacquelyn McCalvin thinks the pollution contributed to the deaths of her parents, Jimmie and Mary Lee Perkins.

I would talk to my father on the phone, and he would tell me stories about how bad the water tasted and smelled, said McCalvin, who was attending Alabama State University in Montgomery at the time. I don`t think they realized what it had done to them.

Dwayne McCants has a lot of questions, too.

I wonder how much damage was done to my family, he said. It may not show up in me, but even now I think about my daughter and my son if they have kids later.

Are my grandkids going to be born normal because of pollution that happened decades ago? It makes me worried.